“The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday said states are free to allow public records access only to their own citizens, delivering a blow to freedom of information advocates who had challenged a Virginia law. In a unanimous ruling, the court said two out-of-state men did not have a right to view the documents. Various other states, including Tennessee, Arkansas and Delaware, have similar laws, although some do not enforce them.” (via Reuters)

“When the Court resumes oral arguments in October, the Justices – along with the rest of us – will face an annual challenge: how to pronounce the names of the parties in (just to name a few) cases like Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, Kloeckner v. Solis, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, and Florida v. Jardines. However, Eugene Fidell, a scholar and lecturer at Yale Law School, and a group of Yale students have solved this problem for many of the Court’s past cases with their Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States, which is hosted by the website of the Yale Law School library.”

“Well-known is the story of Justice Harry Blackmun hunkering down in the medical library of the Mayo Clinic to research abortion procedures in advance of authoring the 1973 majority opinion in Roe v. Wade. But there’s been an information revolution since then. “Now the justices (and their clerks and their librarians) are flooded with information literally at their fingertips. Social science studies, raw statistics, and other data are all just a Google search away,” writes Allison Orr Larsen, a professor at William & Mary Law School.”

Boston Globe – “Everyone knows that Google is changing the way college kids write their term papers. What’s less obvious is that it’s also changing the way that judges write their opinions — even America’s most august judges, those on the Supreme Court. In an absolutely fascinating article in the Virginia Law Review, “Confronting Supreme Court Fact Finding,” Allison Orr Larsen, a law professor at William & Mary, shows just how prevalent online research is at the Supreme Court. “In-house research,” she argues, much of it done online, is changing the way America’s highest court works, and not for the better.”